30 Must-Have Features Of A Good Business Website

Every website is different, but there are many common elements and features of a good business website. Without these, visitors often become frustrated and leave the site long before they purchase a product or achieve the desired goal.  

Here are 30 proven features of a good business website to ensure more sales, conversions and a better overall experience for your website visitors.

A well-designed small business website will convert more visitors to customers and help you see a rise in profits!

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1. DESCRIPTIVE ABOUT US PAGE

I recently dedicated a whole article talking about the process of transforming your about page and there’s a good reason for it! The about page is vital to setting the tone of your business website. It should provide a more personalized look at your company and also help build trust with your visitors.

2. A CLEAR CALL TO ACTION

All too often business websites make it difficult for visitors to reach the goal you've laid out so clearly in your head. Do you want them to sign up to your mailing list? Purchase a product? Contact you? Request a callback? More importantly, what do your visitors want to do when they arrive on your website? There are lots of potential website goals, but whatever yours is, you must make the call to action to achieve this goal clear and simple.

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3. AN EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION BOX

An email subscription opt-in is one of the essential features of a good business website.  It's a simple way to increase the number of leads your website generates by allowing people to subscribe to your email newsletter. Regularly emailing your audience is an excellent way to build relationships and drive sales. There are many free newsletter subscription services to help you get set up quickly and easily.

4. PROMINENTLY DISPLAY YOUR CONTACT NUMBER

Despite all the effort you put into building your website and ensuring it contains everything your customers might find useful, some people simply prefer to talk. Providing a phone number adds trust to your website, making potential customers feel like they have a real person to interact with in times of need, rather than just a faceless website and email address.  Your phone number should be prominently displayed on your website somewhere above the fold and several times sitewide.

5. INCLUDE YOUR HOURS OF OPERATION

This is especially critical if your business provides a hospitality service (a bar, restaurant, fast food etc). Your opening hours should be easy to find and accurate at all times. A link in the header of your website, along with your phone number, is often one of the best places to include these details.

6. CLEAR CONTACT PAGE

It’s difficult to cover all your customers questions on one website, and sometimes, it’s often better to leave some questions unanswered in order to prompt leads to contact you. Having an easily accessible contact page with a form rather than an email address will ensure your visitors can always get in touch when they need to.  A contact page is definitely one of the most critical features of a good business website.

7. A MAP SHOWING YOUR LOCATION

Do you often have customers or suppliers visiting your office? Are you in the hospitality industry where customers are often trying to find you on the move? A Google map on your contact page, or a specific “Find Us” page, is crucial to ensure your customers arrive happy and relaxed when you meet them in person.

8. SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

The way you interact digitally with your target market has probably changed drastically in recent years. Now, business profiles on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are just as important as your website. Ensure social media links are displayed clearly throughout your website, so your leads and customers can interact with you on a more personal level.

9. PHOTOS OF YOU AND YOUR TEAM

You might not like your photo being taken, but adding a photo of you or your team is an excellent way of personalizing your website and adding a face to the business. It builds trust and gives your visitors confidence to purchase from you.

10. CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS

There aren’t many better ways of convincing visitors to buy than descriptive, genuine customer testimonials. Adding a photo of the customer, or even better, a video testimonial can give even more weight to an already powerful trust and confidence builder.

[click_to_tweet tweet="Customer testimonials are an essential feature of a good business website. Check out all 30 features every business website should have." quote="There aren’t many better ways of convincing visitors to buy than descriptive, genuine customer testimonials."]

11. AN INCENTIVE TO CONVERT

I spoke earlier about considering the goal of your customers, but now we need to entice them to achieve that goal. A free whitepaper or checklist (like this one) when they subscribe to your email newsletter, or a discount on services if they buy today, are common strategies to incentivize your call to actions.

12. PROFESSIONALLY WRITTEN COPY

There’s nothing worse on a website than spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. It looks cheap, unprofessional and will turn more customers away than most other website errors. If copywriting isn’t your strength, invest and pay for a professional copywriter to work with you to produce content that is engaging and error free.

13. GOOD SEARCH ENGINE KEY PHRASES

If your website visitors are likely to search for your services, it’s important you think about the phrases they may search for and ensure your copy contains these. If your business is primarily local, try to ensure your local towns and cities are mentioned in your copy. If you’re struggling, there are professional search engine optimization companies that can help boost your search engine rankings.

14.  MOBILE FRIENDLY OR MOBILE RESPONSIVENESS IS ONE OF THE MOST BASIC FEATURES OF A GOOD BUSINESS WEBSITE

With more than 60% of Internet users now using a mobile device such as a tablet or smartphone, it’s now absolutely critical your website works seamlessly across all devices. All good website designers will be able to provide a quote to include this feature in your new website design or convert your current design so it is mobile friendly.

[click_to_tweet tweet=" Mobile friendly or mobile responsiveness is one of the most basic features of a good business website" quote=" Mobile friendly or mobile responsiveness is one of the most basic features of a good business website"]

On a side note.  Mobile friendly does not mean that your website can merely be accessed or seen on a mobile device.  It's about whether the design was built for use and navigation on these mobile devices.  Not sure if your website is mobile friendly?  Use this Google mobile-friendly test to find out.

15. USE A SIMPLE WEBSITE ADDRESS

Keep your website address short and simple. Try to use full words rather than initials or acronyms, and always stick to popular extensions like .com, .org, or your own country extensions such as .co.uk or .com.au

16. INCLUDE A SITE MAP

Building a sitemap (a page containing links to all areas of your website) can sometimes be tedious, but there are lots of tools available that can do it automatically. If you are a WordPress user, a great tool is Yoast.  Sitemaps are excellent for both visitors and search engines alike, ensuring everybody can find all your website content from one easy to navigate page.

17. A BLOG

Blogs don’t have to be complicated.  As long as you have a way of easily updating a page with new content on a regular basis, then consider yourself the owner of a company blog. A blog is absolutely one of the essential features of a good business website because it helps to get your business discovered more easily on the search engines.  Use this page of your small business website to add your latest news and talk about solutions to problems your customers often encounter. It’s excellent commentary for your customers, and just as useful for boosting your search engine rankings.

18. GOOD QUALITY WEB HOSTING

Partnering with a good quality web host is necessary for any successful business. If your website isn’t loading or your emails stop working, it’s your web host who should be there to help. Ensure your web host has 24/7 support available, ideally phone support too, and ensure they make regular backups of your business website in case you ever need them in an emergency.

19. SEARCH FUNCTIONALITY

On large websites especially, it’s important to have a text search where visitors can type a phrase and find a list of results on your website that match. If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress, it’s likely to already have a search function built in. If you’re not using a content management system, Google Site Search is an excellent solution.

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20. A COOKIE POLICY

If your business is based in Europe, or your website serves customers from Europe, you must receive permission from your visitors to store cookies. Cookies are little pieces of data stored on visitors computers to remember certain pieces of information, such as their login username or purchase history.

21. A SECURE SSL CERTIFICATE

If you’re selling products online or customers are handing over personal data, you must have an SSL certificate which makes your website secure.  This prevents criminals from accessing customers personal data such as credit card information or addresses.  These days Google requires that all websites have  SSL installed. 

22. USEFUL ANALYTICS

Once your website is live, it’s important to know how well it is performing. Ask your website designer to install Google Analytics. They should then be able to give you access so you can see the stats yourself (ie. how many visitors your website receives and where they arrive from) or they will be able to provide you a monthly report to show you the performance of your website.

23. FEEDBACK MECHANISMS

Receiving feedback from your customers is as important as ever, and is now easier than ever to receive. Installing a tool such as Get An Insight will display a small feedback tab at the edge of your website. Once clicked, customers can send you their thoughts and suggestions quickly and easily.

24. LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES

Do you notice all the links to external websites in this article? There are two clear reasons for doing this and these are definitely key features every small business website should have. First and foremost it is helpful for our readers to receive further information from other sources. And just as important, linking to other authority websites is a proven technique to improve your search engine rankings.

25. A SIMPLE ORDER PROCESS

Does your order process require visitors to sign up with a username and password? Is it six pages long? If so, it’s time to simplify. Reduce the steps required to make a purchase, and ensure visitors can purchase without having to sign up. By doing this, more customers will buy, and they will be happier at the end of the process when they have just become your customer.

26. WORKING HYPERLINKS

It sounds simple, but broken hyperlinks are a pain for everybody, website owners, and visitors alike. Use an automated service to check your website on a regular basis for broken hyperlinks to ensure nobody ever hits a “Page Not Found” error.

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27. OUTSTANDING IMAGERY

Images can make or break your website. Just like with copywriting, it’s worth investing money into professional photography to display your products. Likewise, if you’re using stock photography, ensure the photos are of a high quality and clearly relate to your visitors.

28. EXCELLENT LOAD SPEED

As more people surf the Internet on their mobile devices, often via a 3G  or LTE connection rather than via Wi-Fi, it’s as important as ever to ensure your website loads quickly. If your website isn’t loading in a couple of seconds, you’re likely to disappoint at least half of your visitors. To increase your website load speed, keep your website simple, compress images so they are small in file size, and use a web host who hosts your files in a location close to where the majority of your visitors reside. For example, if you primarily serve US East Coast visitors, using a web host who stores your files in London is going to reduce your website load time for most of your visitors, compared to a web host storing your files in New York.

29. A GOOD CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

If you want to avoid constantly asking your website designer to update your website, a user-friendly content management system, such as WordPress, will allow you to complete most copy and image updates. Be careful though… this can be time-consuming, so it may provide a better return to simply ask your website designer to do it for you.

30. SECURE BACKUPS

Just like your office computer, it’s entirely possible that one day the computer storing your website files (managed by your web host) will crash and be too badly damaged to fix. In this case, it’s absolutely critical you have your website files backed up. Web hosts often provide these backups for you but don’t rely on them. If you use your website to sell your products and earn revenue, it’s your responsibility to keep your own backups in case of emergency. Speak with your web host for advice if you’re not sure how to create a backup.

Some of the 30 features of a good business website are more important than others, and I hope you’ll find the right elements for your particular website. Rest assured, if you follow the advice here, your small business website will prove effective, secure, and dynamic for all your visitors and customers alike.

Do you need help with your business website?  Feel free to contact me for a free website consultation.